A major connecting link in Ta Ne-hisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power was Barack Obama’s presidency and the way his two terms influenced Coates’s writing. This was something I expected given what I knew about the book before I started reading (and the title, I suppose). What I did not anticipate was how much I would learn about Obama, mainly through the piece ‘My President Was Black’ in which Coates interviewed the President at the end of his term. When I looked back on this collection, I recognized that these insights into Obama were among the most valuable things I learned from this book.
I suspect history will look back on Obama as an early example of how the leadership standards for the US presidency changed during the 21st century. The country is approaching a certain form of crossroads at the moment. Do we remain loyal to our long history of waiting for important problems to become urgent before we commit our time, energy, and resources to resolving them (1)? Or, do we change our approach and take the initiative as de facto leaders in the international community? Obama’s approach to leadership, one where he looks at those in his charge and says that he believes, trusts, and sees the best in all of them, would help future presidents set the right tone as world leaders and help the US demonstrate the ethos of cooperation and mutual accountability required in our future leaders to tackle the global challenges we face in the century ahead.
The way Obama described how he applied his leadership philosophy helped me develop a greater understanding of how to lead within large, complex organizations. For Obama, it was always important to consider the consensus for what he could accomplish and weight it against the risks he needed to take in order to achieve beyond the limits set by that consensus. The calculation was essentially a measure of the expected stability after a change because leadership through consensus limits the opportunity for counterattacks from opponents. On the other hand, change driven by force is vulnerable to resistance from those who feel the hurt, anguish, or injustice that necessitated the change has gone unacknowledged in the implementation.
One up: Another consideration Obama highlighted for leaders was the importance of remembering that people are better at talking about doing things rather than simply doing things. When too much talk threatens a group’s ability to act, the leader’s responsibility is to refocus the group on what can be accomplished and steer the group away from simply outlining all that must be done.
I think those thoughts bring added clarity to how he described his frustration with activists. An activist who fails to understand the limits of a public office will often make a leader feel like not enough is being done to address the concerns of their downtrodden, repressed, or marginalized constituents. A leader tempted to respond to this pressure must remember that an activist will always demand more than what can be accomplished in a given time period. If the leader forgets this basic truth, he or she will risk exchanging the stability inherent in progressive changes for the volatility that comes with sweeping reforms.
One down: Obama drew two lessons from countries that could not maintain sustained support for their attempted reparations-like measures (South Africa and India). First, he noted that the underlying society must accept nondiscrimination as a basic principle. Second, the society must hold itself accountable for its failures in equal measure to how it celebrates accomplishments. I found these lessons discouraging because I don’t see the US doing a very good job in either respect.
Just saying: Reading about Obama in this book was such a highlight for me that I made reading his two published works one of my reading goals in 2019. I’m not sure if this will extend to reading about Obama, though I could probably be convinced if the right author wrote such a book.
Footnotes / US leadership concepts
1. Because, like, what could I possibly know about this topic, right?
Another way to look at this is to consider how Trump might be looked back on as the last President to exemplify a certain kind of leadership standard – a profit-driven, strong-armed figure encouraged by our country’s unquestioning acceptance of easily digestible corporate success stories. I think the world’s success in the future hinges on us losing our patience for the kind of leader energized by narratives, interruptions, and urgency ahead of reality, focus, and priority. In other words, we need more of the standards Eisenhower set for the job during his tenure and less of the oversimplified transactional mentality Trump is reintroducing to the office.
